---
title: 'Senior Data Scientist at Zilch'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-data-scientist-zilch-zilch-k7efr8xg8npv'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-18'
---

# Senior Data Scientist at Zilch

- **Company:** Zilch
- **Location:** Zilch, United Kingdom
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-18
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zilch/559d46dd-b498-4888-b38a-61ea6aaeda31

## Job description

Who we are: We're one of Europe's fastest-growing fintech companies – on a mission to create the world's most empowering way to pay. We launched the product in 2020 and achieved double unicorn status, valued at $2 billion, and since then have taken on more than 6 million customers.

Our mission is to become the best way to pay for anything, anywhere and say goodbye to credit costs for everyone. This is huge. Want to join us? About the Role. We are seeking a talented and experienced Senior Data Scientist to join Zilch’s Risk team, with a focus on developing and optimising advanced models in the Risk space, primarily across credit risk, with additional focus on collections optimisation and fraud detection. You will leverage diverse data sources to support key areas across the business, building production-grade models and decisioning solutions that improve risk outcomes, customer experience, and operational efficiency. This role will involve close collaboration with cross-functional teams, including product managers, engineers, risk strategy, credit, collections, fraud, and other data scientists, to ensure data-driven insights are successfully integrated into product strategies, risk decisioning, and business growth initiatives. This is a hands-on role for someone who combines strong applied machine learning with modern ML Ops practices. We are looking for a data scientist who can take models from exploration through to production, monitoring, and iteration.

Key Responsibilities.

- Work with large and complex datasets to solve a wide array of challenging problems using various analytical and statistical approaches.
- Apply technical expertise with quantitative analysis, experimentation, data mining, and the presentation of data to develop strategies for our products that serve millions of customers and thousands of merchants.
- Build, validate, deploy, and monitor robust, scalable machine learning models and model pipelines across the risk lifecycle, including onboarding, affordability, life-time value, credit/default risk, in-life risk, collections, and fraud.
- Present complex data science findings and methodologies to senior stakeholders clearly and concisely.
- Apply machine learning methods to solve risk and product-related business problems and enhance our decision-making processes.
- Contribute to the team’s coding efforts, ensuring best practices in version control, testing, CI/CD, model deployment, monitoring, methodologies, workflows, and tooling.
- Conduct A/B testing, champion/challenger testing, and experimental analyses to evaluate new features, risk strategies, model changes, and product changes.
- Partner closely with engineering and platform teams to operationalise models, automate workflows, and improve model reliability in production.

What We're Looking For.

- 3+ years of hands-on experience as a data scientist, with a focus on building and deploying models to enhance the customer product experience, risk decisioning, and business outcomes, ideally within credit risk, collections, fraud, financial services, lending, payments, or another decision-intensive domain.
- Proficiency in SQL, Python and core data science and machine learning libraries, such as NumPy, Pandas and Scikit-Learn.
- Strong practical experience with machine learning model development, deployment, monitoring, and iteration in production environments, including cloud-based model training, archiving, serving, endpoint deployment, and tools such as Amazon SageMaker or similar.
- Experience communicating complex ideas to non-technical audiences and senior stakeholders.
- Strong understanding of machine learning methods, their application in real-world scenarios and a keen awareness of their limitations.
- A strong engineering mindset, with the ability to write clean, maintainable, production-ready code, use version control systems such as Git, and collaborate effectively in a multi-developer environment.
- A results-driven approach, with the ability to quickly iterate and improve models in production.
- Knowledge of AI safety considerations, such as bias detection, privacy management, and handling personally identifiable information (PII).
- Familiarity with software development best practices and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, such as GitHub Actions.
- Experience using DBT for data modelling and Looker for BI reporting.
- An interest in staying up to date with evolving technologies and applying them to enhance business outcomes.

Nice to Have. The following are bonuses rather than strict requirements. We do not expect candidates to have all of them:

- Prior experience in credit risk modelling, collections optimisation, fraud detection, or risk strategy.
- Familiarity with risk model governance, explainability, fairness, affordability, or regulatory considerations in financial services.
- Experience with decision science, automated decisioning systems, decision engines, or risk strategy implementation.
- Experience applying neural networks or deep learning approaches to practical risk, fraud, or decisioning problems.

## About Zilch

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Zilch is a London-based fintech that offers a direct-to-consumer, ad-enabled payments and credit platform, letting users pay now or over time with no interest while earning rewards.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C; last extended in 2022 to £122m total)
- **Headquarters**: London, United Kingdom (with an innovation and technology hub in Krakow, Poland)
- **Founded**: 2018
- **Founders**: Philip Belamant (CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Financial technology (Fintech) – payments, consumer credit, and advertising.
- **Target customers**: B2C – consumers across the credit spectrum (subprime to prime). Also B2B – merchants who pay for high-intent customer access through the Zilch app.
- **Mission statement**: “To eliminate the high cost of consumer credit. For good.”

## Products & Services
- **[Zilch Payments Platform]**: A virtual payments card (and soon a physical Visa card) enabling online and in-store purchases.
  - **Pay Now**: Pay upfront and earn up to 5% cashback in Zilch Rewards.
  - **Pay over 6 weeks**: Interest-free installment option.
  - **Pay over 3 months**: For larger purchases; no interest, no late fees.
- **[Zilch Ad Network]**: An ad-enabled platform where merchants pay performance-based commissions for access to Zilch’s high-intent customer base. Revenue is shared with customers to subsidise credit costs.
- **[Snooze]**: A feature allowing customers to delay payments by up to 8 days for flexibility.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed (Zilch is a private unicorn, named UK’s fastest-growing tech unicorn by the Financial Times in 2025).
- **Key Metric**: **Total funding** – £122m (Series C extended, closed in 2022 from a £42m extension on the initial £83m Series B round). Also secured a £150m securitised debt facility led by Deutsche Bank in 2025.
- **Recent Financials (FY 2025)**:
  - Revenue: **£110.3m** (93% increase YoY)
  - Gross Merchandise Value (GMV): **£1.9bn** (73% increase YoY)
  - Net losses reduced by 79% year-over-year; achieved first quarter of operating profit in July 2024.
  - 5-year CAGR: 378% on revenue, 285% on GMV.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**:
  - Debt facility from **Goldman Sachs Asset Management** and **Deutsche Bank**.
  - Multi-year strategic partnership with **Visa** (expanding acceptance to over 150 million merchants).
  - All major UK credit referencing agencies.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Nearly **5 million registered customers**.
  - Monthly GMV exceeded £200m for the first time in 2024.
  - Pay over 3 months product, launched in 2024, now represents 14% of total volume.
  - Spend per active user up 27% compared to FY 2024.
  - Ranked UK’s fastest-growing tech unicorn by the Financial Times, Deloitte, and The Sunday Times in 2025.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Ad-enabled business model**: Zilch subsidises the cost of credit through merchant commissions, creating a two-sided network that rewards both customers and merchants.
- **No interest, no late fees, no penalties**: A genuinely consumer-friendly credit product that aligns the company’s success with customer wellbeing (they do not profit from customer debt).
- **Direct-to-consumer model**: Zilch owns the customer relationship end-to-end (not a white-label product), allowing them to generate first-party data and optimise for conversion rates that far exceed traditional digital ads.
- **Strong unit economics**: Revenue take rate of 6.08% on GMV, and gross profit margin of 49%. Massive growth with improving profitability.

## Strategic Focus
- **Expanding acceptance and usage**: Launching a physical Visa card in the UK in September 2025 to increase wallet share and everyday spend.
- **Growing product breadth**: The new Pay over 3 months product is seeing strong repeat behaviour, and Snooze is being rolled out across all credit purchases.
- **Geographic expansion**: Growing across Europe, with a tech hub in Poland for innovation.
- **Capital efficiency**: Focused on profitability and reducing net losses, leveraging a £150m securitisation facility to scale GMV towards £8bn annually.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Values-driven with a focus on “doing it for our customers,” “doing it the right way,” and “doing it brilliantly.” Emphasis on trust and autonomy.
- **Hybrid working**: Zilch operates a hybrid model, reducing daily commuting.
- **Benefits**: Private medical insurance, enhanced parental leave, free snacks and drinks, 5% back on purchases via Zilch Rewards, training budget, learning platform, and online therapy/mental health support.
- **Growth & development**: Regular reviews, hackathons, a training budget, and an internal learning platform. Zilch invests in employee career progression.
- **Team size**: 289 employees (including contractors) as of March 2025. Flat, impact-focused structure.
- **Inclusive environment**: Zero-tolerance for discrimination; equal opportunities policy for all applicants and employees, including disabled persons.

## Sources
1. [Zilch – Careers Page](https://www.zilch.com/uk/careers/)
2. [Zilch – About Us](https://www.zilch.com/uk/about-us/)
3. [Zilch – Homepage](https://www.zilch.com/uk/)
4. [Zilch – Open Roles on Ashby](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zilch)
5. [Zilch Holdings Limited FY 2025 Annual Report](https://www.zilch.com/pdf/financial-statements/zilch-technology-limited-annual-report-and-financial-statements-FY-2025.pdf)

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